VIA was not shy on recent
announcements either these last couple weeks. The chipset producer somewhat unexpectedly
announced a dual channel core logic based on its PT880 chipset earlier this
week; which was followed up by a quick commitment from Soltek, among
others. On unrelated VIA news, analysts report that VIA’s November sales
figures were off over 16% from October.

Looking at our AMD
motherboards this week, it looks like VIA has the most aggressive motherboards
for Athlon 64 3200+ (socket 754). Right now, we feel the MSI K8T800
motherboard is the best of the
batch as far as price/performance goes. The Chaintech nForce3 150 beats
the MSI K8T800 in performance, but the MSI board costs $60 less (35%). Perhaps
now that MSI closed down 1/3 of its US offices, they are able to keep more competitive
pricing.

Athlon XP motherboards are
all over the spectrum. Contrary to popular opinion, prices tend to gently ramp
up during the holiday season (followed by that January free-for-all that
represents the real deals). We are seeing small and medium changes in the
motherboard pricing, but don’t hold your breath for any cuts before January. Occasionally,
we’ve seen some good deals but they are generally one or two day items. Fortunately,
KT600 boards have been falling in price for so long that their stability now
will result in no more significant, immediate price increases.

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10 Comments

While over the last few weeks I have begun to agree with you. This board is designed by my particular favorite former-Abit employee (he also did the BP6), and really is a killer design. Anyone else object?

I think the DFI Ultra Infinity should be recommended over the Asus A7N8X Deluxe. The Infinity is faster, overclocks higher, supports 4x SATA raid, Digital coaxial S/PDIF in and out, CMOS reloaded BIOS setup and costs less than the A7N8X!Reply

So uh why does INTEL price their only competing cpu to the athlon 51 FX at like twice the price?I mean I know they can bullshit their marketing to anyone they want without AMD making a single protest, but the serious gamers will never buy it. Not when the FX is better at less price.Reply